I’ve been searching a lot around the net lately for a decent shopping system that is PHP/MySQL driven, and the best thing I found was osCommerce – so far. I noticed today that there is a new shopping CMS being developed at Intersprire which is called StoreSuite. The biggest problem is that it isn’t finished yet. But from what I can read on their blog, it’s gonna have a lot more features than any other system. AJAX, easy design adjusting, and a whole lot of other stuff. Have a look at this great shopping cart software. They say it will be released in Q4 2007 – Can’t wait to get my hands on it. Until I can install it, I will follow the development of this piece on the official development blog. I pray it will work in Germany…

That’s a nice answer to YouTube and flickr: Mix these! With ANIMOTO, you can take pictures from your flickr account and animate them with music. You can choose music from ANIMOTO’s library or upload your own mp3. ANIMOTO analyzes the pictures and music and creates you a cool video out of it.

Now to the downside: You can only creat free videos that are 30 seconds long. For 3$, you can create a ‘full-length’ video, which means more then even 10 minutes, I guess. Actually, I wanted to invest the 3$ to try it out, but you can only pay with Google and for their service you need a credit card which I don’t have. Why can’t I choose to pay with PayPal, damn it!

You’ve created the Google Sitemaps file with one of the many available WordPress plugins? You added it to your Google Webmaster Tools account? You added it to your robots.txt file? Good. I did that, too. But all that work, just for Google? Of course, Google is the mighty giant and most important, but now that you have gone through all the hardships creating it, why not ‘feature’ it a bit more? Think of it as a huge RSS feed that you can give to search engines. You might want to reach more then only Google – and there are some more that accept it! So here you go, a list with all the search engines I could find that accept your sitemap_index.xml file:

After buying the Nintendo Wii the weekend before last, we headed back to the store on friday evening where we bought it, near line 2 station Dongchang road. We wanted a second Wii controller all week badly to play Wii Sports: Tennis and other games against each other, and the game store lady told us she would have new ones in last week. And she did! But damn, a controller costs almost a quarter of the whole console set, a whopping 450 kuai. At least we bargained in some games with that price – one of them being The Sims 2: Pets.

Now after we bought the Wii my wife told me that she’d like to have some ‘real life’ game, and I guess no other game than The Sims comes near that request. I played the very first one a couple of years ago quite heavily for about two weeks, but when I’d realized that there was no ‘end’ of the game in that sense, I got tired of it and never touched it again. You just keep on playing The Sims, there will never be any end-boss or something else – that’s weird and fascinating at the same time.

Saturday afternoon we launched the game – and from the second the game started, my wife was hooked. We (actually: she) didn’t stop playing until the middle of the night! It’s quite more complex than the first Sims game, you have much more choices, but the concept is the same: live. Your Sim needs to eat, sleep, shower and sh*t. At the same time, you have one or more pets to take care of – you can create a family, and then add cats and / or dogs. The pets require attention, too: They also need food, and you can teach them tricks, you can scream at them when they dig around in your garden, and, and, and… What’s completely new is the ‘town center’, where you can go with your pets and get them washed, buy them cakes and meet other Sims.

The game is really great, so why not buy it? Because you (the man) will not be able to touch another game again. I wanted to finally finish Resident Evil 4 so bad, I wanted to continue saving Hyraule with my Zelda hero, I wanted to try out the insanely funny Wario Moves… But that all had to wait. I could have glued the controller to my wife’s hands, it wouldn’t have mattered – she didn’t let go anymore, until late that night.

And I can hardly blame her, having experienced exactly the same with the first part some years ago! So do yourself (and your action game needs) a favor, and never ever buy The Sims 2: Pets (if you have a wife). Trust me on that one…

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

German magazine SPIEGEL has published a rather interesting interview with Pan Yue of the ministry of the environment of China. He talks quite open and honest, it seems. Read it here! It’s not that long, but still worth the time.